Does the posterwork from a distance? How does it look up close?

3. Grab attention - be assertive with design by using striking (but relevant) visual elements4. Hold attention - provide useful, precise information that is legible from a short distance

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A primary goal of graphic designers is to present content so that visual, design, andtextual content work in harmony to convey information and create the desiredeffect. That goal is one to work for, whether your material is a brochure for astudent club or program, a poster for a special event, a business card, or a researchreport that uses the visual representation of data to reinforce or extend anargument. The principles of proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast can befollowed to make sure that your visual and design content works in concert withyour verbal content so that you communicate efficiently or argue effectively.

Words have a dialectical relationship with nearby images. Words comment onimages; images help illustrate or explain verbal content. The viewer's eye tends tobe drawn to the visual, but words also shape the reader's perception.

While it's unethical tomanipulate tables to convey data inaccurately, you can make design decisions thatpresent data clearly to help readers understand what you're trying to say.

Pie charts show the relative quantities of the components of something. You coulduse a pie chart to show the makeup of a group of people, with each slice of the piehaving a size corresponding to the percentage of people in that group.

Bar graphs show comparative relationships across a data set, correlated with acommon reference point. For example, a bar graph could show how much timepeople in different fields spent writing at their jobs.

Line graphs show relationships among types of data, such as the change in quantity(e.g., revenue) over time. Data are divided into logical unites on the vertical andhorizontal axes

■ D ire c t d ie rea d er s eye to th e m o s t Im p o rta n t Inform ation

Technical communicators and technical communication teachers, regardless of their education and job experience

“Underlying motive is dishonest—wanting audience to misinterpret information by not reading or readily comprehending it.”• “The purpose is to deceive because you are hoping that the viewer will not understand what he/she is seeing.”• “The intent is to deceive the reader and to lead him/her into ignoring important imformation.”

“ It changes the meaning of the results in a way the reader is not likely to discover.”• “This could be construed as an advantage to the reader, having larger type, thus easier to read.”• “This misleads the reader and does not factually represent the situation.”

“The reader of the graph has some obligation to check how the data is presented.”• “The reader must be responsible for carefully evaluating the information.”• “ People are responsible for reading warranties and taking care of themselves! ’Let the buyer beware’ is the credo of the business world.”

This finding of “strict” men and “lenient” women could also support Gilligan’s claim that men ordinarily adopt a principle of justice to guide their ethical decisions, whereas women are more likely to exercise or integrate a principle of caring (1982, 1987). Nevertheless, on this survey, men and women offer virtually identical explanations of their answers, emphasizing the positive or negative consequences of a specific design decision.

Question 6: “It is the reader’s responsibility to carefully review the material.” Here is the same respondent’s explanation for Question 7: “It is your job to

The relative frequency of specific types of explanations, however, disguises the rarity with which individuals display a consistent guiding philosophy.

Aristotle’s golden mean (i.e., vice in the extremes, virtue in moderation), Kant’s categorical imperative (i.e., unconditional and universal obligations of conscience), and Mill’s principle of utility (i.e., the greatest good for the greatest number).

The pilot testing, however, also revealed that students were tentative in judging the seven situations, preferring “mostly ethical” or “mostly unethical” as their answers, whereas the majority of professional communicators chose either “completely ethical” or “completely unethical” as their answers.

Is This Ethical?

there is widespread feeling among many copyrightscholars that Congress has unabashedly ceded to the lobbying pressures of thecopyright industries and steadily cut into the heart of the public domain

(however faulty, in my view, as the constitutional provision actually emphasizesknowledge creation rather than product creation as the goal of the progress clause)

Today it is more likely that technical communicators, who have special accessto communication development that can affect vast numbers of users, readers, andviewers, are able to influence society through critical analysis and rhetorical ex-pression in choices for how they create products rather than choices in which prod-ucts they create. Technical communicators who influence product development orrhetorical treatment of communication and do so on the basis of knowledge work,even without producing legally protectable speech, may influence the democraticprocess nevertheless

The creative choices made in enabling ease of access andpalatability to users, authored per copyright law and arguably protectable underFirst Amendment law, have allowed innovation to support democratic participa-tion by providing a means of interaction to thousands of users.

The most powerful of these changes is the Court’s constitutionalization of the fairuse portion of the 1976 Copyright Act, the statutory law that supports access andfree speech in copyright.

There is no doubt from the perspective of access advocates that the SupremeCourt’s response inEldred v. Ashcroftnot to disavow the 20-year copyright termextension was harmful to the public domain.

As I discuss in more detail later, it is significant that the CTEA was also sup-ported as a means to “harmonize” with European law.

And a demo-cratic government is possible only if its people have a voice and are able to expressthemselves. The classic works of Alexander Meiklejohn (1948) support the princi-ple that free speech exists in the U.S. because it was necessary to make self-gov-ernment possible (Werhan, 2009, p. 310). Thus, speech is central to the democraticeffort.

ideas should freely spread from one to an-other over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man

The U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause states, “The Congress shallhave the power...toPromote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by secur-ing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respec-tive writings and Discoveries” (U.S. Const., art. 1, §8, cl. 8). The Framers of theConstitution created a structure in the intellectual property provision that prioritizesthe advancement of learning and knowledge creation over its secondary, supportivepurpose: to benefit the author. To provide a benefit to the author merely creates anincentive for authors to expend energy to create new work. Note that U.S. copyrightdiffers greatly from that of moral rights, which is the adopted structure in Europeanlaw, based on the concept that creators have an absolute right to benefit from theirwork and that their right comes from a special moral requirement.

Often in introductory technical communication text-books, the concept of copying is equated with intellectual“theft,” which is contrasted with the notion of “originality”of words and ideas.

1.The purpose and character of the use2.The nature of the copyrighted work3.The amount and substantiality of the portionused4.The effect on the potential market for the work

he concept of “work-for-hire” is an excellent startingpoint for illuminating these differences. The “work-forehire” clause in U.S. copyright law identifies the legal authorof a work as the employer, not the writer, for:(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope ofhis or her employment; or(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use asa contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motionpicture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as asupplementary work, as a compilation, as an instruc-tional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or asan atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a writteninstrument signed by them that the work shall be con-sidered a work made for hire. (Title 17, Chapter 1,Section 201, U.S. Copyright Law)

A technical writer has been hired on a limited-term contract to create, with the help of another writer,the user and administrator guides for a software tool.Who is the “author” of the guides?

Instructors or practitioners of technical communicationwho wish to research plagiarism and technical communi-cation, whether for pedagogical, scholarly, or practical pur-poses, will currently find it quite difficult. They will findrich scholarly literature and engaged academic debate inthe related fields of rhetoric and composition, computersand composition, writing center studies and writing pro-gram administration, but will find a dearth of materials thatspecifically address programmatic or pedagogical concernswithin the scholarship of our own field.

While this type of policy change may not be feasibleon a departmental level, especially for technical communi-cation programs that are housed within English depart-ments, policies might be incorporated into the syllabi fortechnical communication classes in particular.

Introducing scenarios, both in the classroomand in textbooks, that ask students to wrestle with under-standings of the legal and ethical implications of copyingand re-use allows for exploration of plagiarism as acontext-specific concept.

As I have discussed above, there are problematic assump-tions inherent in the ways we discuss plagiarism in ourtextbooks, and as a result, likely a problem with how wediscuss plagiarism in our classes.

Another distinction is between “common knowledge,”which includes those ideas that one cannot “own” becausethey are publicly acknowledged and accepted as true, andoriginal ideas. These distinctions—between original ideas,owned knowledge

Rockley also argues that “technical communicatorsneed to understand how information can be used in mul-tiple ways as they write to ensure that their content isreusable” (191

In practice, most lab- oratory and field studies blend together direct questioning and observation methods into one study.

In the final analysis, the tension between explo- ration and grading has encouraged the variety of approaches to the study of usability in technical communication. They hold equally compelling beliefs that the natural experience can be a test of usability and that grading the text would offer the best (most efficient) test of usability.

Because no one group focuses on usability exclusively, devel- oping a comprehensive approach to studying it during prod- uct development, testing, and natural use, it certainly makes a difference to a particular study which group is conducting the study. If we were to ask each of these groups to study users learning to use a word processor, the resulting studies would differ in foci, methods, goals, findings, and philoso- phy.

He finds that reminding themselves of infor- mation is as important as pointers to finding information, and that workers view classification of information as their most difficult task.

Filter 3: Research Questions That Can Be Posed in Usability Research Research questions give us another filter on the studies, partic- ularly if we see these questions as means of assessing whether a study focuses on one type of question or cuts a broader swath. By grouping the typical research questions posed about usability into questions that focus on the product, questions that focus on the user, and questions that focus on the milieu, we can quickly see whether a study goes deeply into one type of research question.

Surveys, interviews, and comprehension tests are not particularly helpful in finding out what moves users make while they use a product.

Sociology- Another group, though peripheral to the day-to- day study of usability, is made up of sociologists and an- thropologists. These researchers have contributed studies of people working with computers that point out dimensions of usability that are not seen in a laboratory study

When we are working inside a discipline, everyone shares values and goals, a com- mon educational platform, and a common world view. We cannot assume that commonality in multidisciplinary work. Thus, the step of articulating the context of a study helps us to better understand why a study is as it is

Consider some of the decisions faced by a particular study- how to measure using, what to consider successful, or where in the development cycle to conduct the test.

Ed- itorial experts can find style problems more efficiently, and more reliably, than users can. Technical experts can locate problems with the technical content of a manual more effi- ciently, and more reliably, than users can. Although traditional evaluation handles many problems well, it does not necessar- ily expose usability problems

Rittel and Webber claim that responding to wicked problems is at once avaluative and deliberative process.

Indeed, many of the issues that demand our collective attention(e.g., global climate change, educational reform, widespread unemployment)are so “wicked,” andill-defined, that they require us to expand our thinkingbeyond a linear, definition/solution model for research and social planning.Environmental catastrophes like the 2010 Gulf oil spill are noteworthy in thisregard: that is, because they are so complex in their causes and effects, theycannot necessarily be “solved” in any simple sense of the term.

They differ from conventionaltopoi, however, in the sense that they encompassnot only language but also the visual, material, functional, and organizational focithat Buchanan describes.

Indeed, even though thewell was officially capped on September 19th, 2010, the spill continued to be anongoing point of disputation.

There is no immediateand no ultimate test of asolution to a wickedproblem.

Placements function in a similar way as rhetorical topics in the sense that theyare ostensibly universal in scope but can be applied in particular situations.They differ from conventionaltopoi, however, in the sense that they encompassnot only language but also the visual, material, functional, and organizational focithat Buchanan describes.

One prominent issue for my students—and a usefullesson for me as an instructor—was that individual groups did not always agreewith one another regarding the information they were gathering. How much oilhad actually been released into the Gulf? What effects would dispersants haveon the marine ecology? Who was ultimately to blame for the incident? Simply put,we quickly learned that the process of inquiry—even the seemingly “basic” task oflocating reliable information—was a wicked problem in its own right.

To implement this focus, I used Rittel and Webber’s 10 characteristics (seeTable 1) to identify the Gulf spill as a wicked problem; and to teach strategiesfor rhetorical invention, I used Buchanan’s doctrine of placements as a heuristicfor addressing specific issues based on students’ personal, disciplinary, andprofessional interests.

Students used placements strategically both within and between groups. Forexample, a group that included wildlife and forestry majors could adopt “activitiesand organized services” as a starting point. Taking this approach allowed themto manage the scope of their inquiry (e.g., they could focus, generally, on theways in which oil was affecting flora and fauna along the coast) and guidethem in developing specific projects (e.g., they could design and propose theimplementation of new, cost-effective wildlife habitats in the coastal estuaries).

1. the design of symbolic and visual communications;2. the design of material objects;3. the design of activities and organized services; and4. the design of complex systems or environments for living, working, playing,and learning.

Both are wicked in the ways that Rittel and Webberdescribe. They confirm, for instance, that “there is no definite formulation ofa wicked problem” (e.g., the sinking of Deepwater Horizon warranted a varietyof responses based on different assessments of the incident) and that “everywicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem” (e.g.,the spill can be linked to human fallibility but also to energy consumption habitsthat can be used to warrant, even if they may not necessitate, drilling for oil inthe Gulf of Mexico).